Angel Betrayed (The Fallen #2)(4)

“You can’t be too careful,” she whispered, her body tight because he was still touching her—and she liked it. Can’t. Too dangerous. Wanting Sam could make her weak, and lust was a weakness she couldn’t afford right then.

Unfortunately for her kind, lust was like kryptonite. The closer the temptation, the stronger the weakness.

“So you need protection.” His stare narrowed on her. “What, exactly, does that mean?” He paused. “Do you need a guard? Someone to watch over you? Or . . .” His left hand rose. His fingers curved under her cheek and his thumb brushed over her lips. Her breath caught, and her heart raced in her chest. “Do you want me to kill someone for you, Seline?”

Killing would be easy for him. Sometimes, she worried it might become too easy for her. “I-I don’t know what to do. I’ve been hiding, and I thought I was safe, but they found me.”

“They?” His right hand still cradled her thigh and seemed to scorch her flesh.

“His friends. They know what I did, and they aren’t the kind of men you can just walk away from.” She let fear seep into her voice. The better to sound weak. Men liked it when women were needy, right? Help me. “They’re dangerous, Sam, and they’ve got a lot of power.”

His gaze searched hers. Then his mouth dipped close to hers. Seline stopped breathing. He was going to kiss her and her hormones would go wild. Control. She had to stay in—

He didn’t kiss her. He smiled. And dammit, she’d actually been pressing up on her toes to get closer to him.

Heat stained her cheeks. I don’t blush. But she was—or rather, she’d started blushing since she met Sam. He made her too uncomfortable.

“What makes you think I’m the kind of man who offers protection?”

She didn’t think he’d give her protection. She wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t the protecting kind.

He was the killing kind.

She wet her lips and felt the tension mount in his body. “I know what you are.” Half-truth. She knew what he wasn’t. She was still working on the rest. Out of a thousand possibilities, she’d narrowed down the choices to a top five list—and nothing on that list was good.

“And what’s that?”

Now this was the dangerous part. If she’d calculated wrong, he could attack her. Good thing she wasn’t very easy to kill. “You’re not human.” This she knew with absolute certainty. Demons didn’t play guard bitch to humans. The food chain didn’t work that way.

No change of expression crossed his face. But his head came closer to hers and his lips—why would that cruel edge be sexy?—pressed against her mouth. She expected the kiss to be hard and rough. What else? But when his mouth took hers, it was just . . . a taste.

His tongue licked her lips and stroked inside her mouth. Slow. Easy. As if he were sampling her.

Her tongue slipped to meet his. To taste. To want. Sam.

When he pulled back, she had to fight to keep her hands off him. Or rather, she had to fight not to yank the guy back and take a lot more from him. Dangerous.

His gaze studied her a moment, and she barely dared to breathe. “I’m not human,” he finally agreed, his voice a deep rumble. “But neither are you, sweetheart. Neither are you.”

True enough. Now this was the dicey part. Time for some half-truth, half-lies. “You know I’m a demon.” Yeah, and good for her, she could admit that truth without flinching in shame anymore.

“Like to like,” he murmured. “That’s the way, right?”

Right. In the Other world, paranormals could recognize their own kind. Maybe it was Mother Nature’s way of making sure the Other didn’t vanish into the mist. If you recognized your own kind, it sure made mating within the same subset easier. Demons could see right through the magic glamour that shielded their kind from human attention. The easiest tip-off that you were dealing with a fellow demon? Go for the eyes.

A demon’s real eyes were pitch-black. The lens, the sclera—everything was black. But thanks to the glamour that even the least powerful of demons could manage, humans never saw that telling stare. Well, not unless the demons wanted them to see. In that case . . . good-bye, human. Because when you saw that darkness, death was coming.

Seline cloaked her black stare with glamour, twenty-four/ seven. For her, it was as natural as breathing. When humans looked into her eyes, they saw a warm brown gaze, not that chilling black.

But Sam . . . his eyes were different. She’d caught the slip of his eye color once. Just once—when Temptation had burst into flames, and she’d been trapped in the fire. His bright blue stare had faded to black then. She’d almost missed that change because of the freaking fire all around her.

One slip had shown her his true nature. But the problem was that she should have always been able to see the black of his eyes. He shouldn’t have been able to maintain a shield against her.

Sam wasn’t your average demon. Actually, she wasn’t even convinced he was a demon because there was something else rather unusual about him. When she looked at him hard enough, long enough, Seline could see the dark, shadowy image of . . . wings on his back.

Demons didn’t have wings.

Sure, she’d heard of some really, really old demons who had tails and one guy with cloven feet, but wings? Not so much a demon thing.